"Reforming Schools" will transform the study of school reform, development and improvement. It not only provides an overview of research findings, professional and political issues and policy developments and their history; it also relates such thinking to practice through a rich and multi-faceted case study of school reform. Particular emphasis is given to urban schooling, with a candid look at what can be learnt not only from successful school reforms but also from failure. The authors provide questions and exercises throughout to help readers interact with case-study material. "Reforming Schools" enables the readers to experience what it is like to work in the field in a way that no other book on school reform does.

In Reforming Schools, Jesse Goodman discusses the possibilities, struggles, and complexities involved in reforming today's schools. Drawing from his own experiences at the Harmony Education Center—a progressive educational center he helped establish in 1990—Goodman offers a vision of how to persevere at a time when many progressive educators are feeling discouraged. He focuses on practical ideas for reform, such as establishing school autonomy; creating democratic structures, rituals, and values upon which school reform discourse can be generated; and by addressing the current conservative agenda, how to influence what happens in our nation's public schools. By situating school reform within a progressive history of Western society, the author offers valuable insights and ideas that are alternatives to both the conservative and the radical left analyses of schools and society.

This book, the 14th yearbook of the American Education Finance Association (AEFA), provides a review and appraisal of the "educational perestroika" that has occurred over the past decade, both in the United States and in other developed countries. Rather than assessing the outcomes of a decade of educational reform, it examines the present and future of educational reform. Part 1 contains seven chapters that explore reform initiatives in the United States, while the second part is comprised of four chapters that examine reform initiatives abroad. Part 3 considers the future of school reform. Following the preface, the chapters include: (1) "School Reform in the United States: Putting It into Context" (Susan H. Fuhrman, Richard F. Elmore, and Diane Massell); (2) "Cooperative Performance Incentives in Education" (Craig E. Richards, Daniel Fishbein, and Paula Melville); (3) "'Professionalizing' Teaching by Expanding Teachers' Roles" (Betty Malen); (4) "Decentralization and Community Control" (G. Alfred Hess, Jr.); (5) "Negotiating Reform: Preliminary Findings" (Julia E. Koppich and Charles Taylor Kerchner); (6) "Educational Choice: Competing Models and Meanings" (Bruce S. Cooper); (7) "Cost Analysis as a Tool for Education Reform" (David H. Monk and Jennifer A. King); (8) "International School Reform: Political Considerations" (Frances C. Fowler, William L. Boyd, and David N. Plank); (9) "Pursuit of School Quality in England and Wales" (Peter Ribbins and Hywel Thomas); (10) "Benevolence in Canadian Public Schools" (Daniel J. Brown); (11) "Educational Transformations in a 'United' Germany" (Wolfgang Mitter and Manfred Weiss); and (12) "School Reform and the 'New World Order'" (James W. Guthrie). A subject and author index are included. The appendix contains a list of the AEFA Board of Directors, 1993-94. (LMI)

Universities have never been static. Even so, it is fair to say they have experienced a most radical transformation in the past twenty years. During this period, the role and responsibility of the state generally have been broadly limited while allowing ‘market forces’--private ownership and control--more influence. But even where the state is still the main provider or funder, it relies increasingly on ‘market mechanisms’, for example contractual relations between state and institutions, competition among providers for resources, and external assessment of ‘outputs’ which means the results or impact of what universities do, in particular teaching and research. The new terminology speaks of price and competition, inputs and outputs, resources, cost and benefits, demand and supply, provider and customer, consumers and investors, quality control and accountability. Education, and post-secondary education especially are increasingly seen as matters for markets. Formal post-secondary education becomes a service, commercialized and traded across national borders. This volume on changing relationship between state and market, contains, besides an introductory analytic overview of the issues, accounts from different countries, regions, and thematic perspectives. Chapter authors describe and analyze government reforms and other developments that have directly or indirectly affected this relationship. Although the geographical focus is on North America, especially Mexico, South East Asia and Europe, the phenomenon is not limited to these regions and countries but worldwide.

This book examines some of the major higher education reforms and policy shifts globally, particularly in the light of recent shifts in quality and standards-driven education and policy research. It critiques the neo-liberal ideological imperatives of current higher education and policy reforms, and illustrates the way that changes in the relationship between the state and higher education policy affect current trends in higher education reforms. Using diverse comparative education paradigms from critical theory to historical-comparative research, the chapters focus on globalisation, ideology and higher education reforms and examine both the reasons and outcomes of higher education reforms and policy change. The book analyses and evaluates the policy shifts in methodological approaches to globalisation and higher education reforms, and their impact on education policy and pedagogy. The book contributes in a very scholarly way, to a more holistic understanding of the nexus between globalisation, comparative education research and higher education reforms.

This book explores the interrelationship between ideology, the state, and education reforms, placing it in a global context. It examines some of the major education reforms and policy issues in a global culture, particularly in light of recent shifts in quality and standards-driven education, and policy research. The book critiques the neo-liberal ideological imperatives of current education and policy reforms, and illustrates the way the shifts in the relationship between the state and education policy affect current trends in education reforms and schooling globally. With this as its focus, the book’s individual chapters highlight hand-picked scholarly research on major discourses in the field of comparative education. A compendium of the very latest thinking on the subject, the book – like the other volumes in the series – offers a state-of-the-art sourcebook for researchers, practitioners and policymakers alike. Not only do the chapters offer a timely overview of current issues affecting comparative education and education policy research in what is now a global educational culture; they also outline future directions that education and policy reforms could take. By doing so, they provide a comprehensive picture of the intersecting and diverse discourses of globalisation and policy-driven reforms in education. Individual chapters critically assess the dominant discourses and debates on education and policy reforms. Using diverse comparative education paradigms from critical theory to historical-comparative research, they address globalisation, ideology and democracy and examine both the reasons for and outcomes of education reforms and policy change. As such, they provide an informed critique of models of quality and standards-driven education reforms that are informed by Western dominant ideologies and social values.

Education policymaking is traditionally seen as a domestic political process. The job of deciding where students will be educated, what they will be taught, who will teach them, and how it will be paid for clearly rests with some mix of district, state, and national policymakers. This book seeks to show how global trends have produced similar changes to very different educational systems in the United States and Japan. Despite different historical development, social norms, and institutional structures, the U.S. and Japanese education systems have been restructured over the past dozen years, not just incrementally but in ways that have transformed traditional power arrangements. Based on 124 interviews, this book examines two restructuring episodes in U.S. education and two restructuring episodes in Japanese education. The four episodes reveal a similar politics of structural education reform that is driven by symbolic action and bureaucratic turf wars, which has ultimately hindered educational improvement in both countries.